Welcome to my astronomy blog, I dedicate myself to the simplest form of amateur astronomy which requires only portable equipments.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Dark Cube: new monochromatic 5mp CMOS camera

This is the second light, I've placed a simple convex lens between the BF10 and the camera nosepiece, this is effectively a reducer.

The result is that, the chip can hold the smaller solar disc with ample spaces so that I could move the sun around while imaging.

I've set sharpcap to get 600 frames, i.e. more than 2 minutes at around 4-5 fps with full 5mp resolution. Since the solar disc was moving around, the Newton's ring was averaged out and the dust removed too.

The file is 8.5G in size! Transfering the file from my tablet to my PC took nearly an hour via wifi! Crazy indeed, and I've tried to move that file via a micro SD card but then the system complains that the file system on the SD does not support that large a file!

Registax is moving slowly...

The time stamp was not from the camera and not from the driver too, as the manufacturer said, I've to double check with Sharpcap to see if I might turn that off. A bit annoying...

The image was a bit soft, I suspect it could be a result of:

1. bad focus, you know, I'm effectively imaging at very big image scale despite I'm working at less than around 400mm since the pixel density is oh so high!

2. poor seeing, again, due to the big effective image scale... also the relatively long capturing window will blur fine detail. I shall check.

In summary, if I were to take a fine full disc shot, use full 5mp resolution.

If I were to capture fine high resolution detail, I should go for ROI, and that will allow much faster frame rate and then, I could freeze seeing.